Historical Studies, GIS For

Applications in History

Historians and historical geographers using GIS have applied the technology to a variety of subjects, particularly those for which the linear nature of the written narrative fails to convey the complexity of historical experiences. Given the origins of GIS software, it is not surprising that historians have employed the technology for work on environmental and land use history, the history of built environments such as cities, and the history of transportation and commerce. This type of work has helped stimulate the development of historic map collections, of which the David Rumsey Collection is perhaps the best known. GIS has been used as an organizing tool by several online digital history projects, such as the “Witch Trials Archive” and the “Valley of the Shadow” U.S. Civil War project. Military historians have been attracted to GIS, and this focus offers some government employment opportunities because GIS is used for research and public presentations about battlefield parks. A number of ongoing projects build data repositories for GIS work on particular countries, which generally concentrate on the administrative boundaries and demographic information of the past two centuries. The Great Britain Historical GIS is a good example. In terms of its chronological and spatial framework, the China Historical GIS is much more ambitious because it seeks to encompass several thousand years of the history of a major world region in which close to a quarter of the world's population has lived. The project well illustrates the importance of gazetteer research.

Some of the most notable historical work involving GIS has been associated with the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI). These cultural atlases combine data, including texts and images, with cartography to provide users with a means to understand a cultural phenomenon during a particular time period and within a defined geographic space. Many of these atlas projects link information from multiple sources and often integrate dispersed but once-related objects or texts into a digital collection.

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